Black Friday: Crowdsourcing Communities of Risk

Black Friday

Just before dawn on Friday, November 28, 2008, Jdimytai Damour, a thirty-four-year-old Wal-Mart employee, was killed in a futile attempt to prevent a crowd of approximately two thousand shoppers from streaming through the main entrance to the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres Shopping Plaza in Valley Stream, New York. Just minutes before it was scheduled to open at 5:00 a.m., Damour was overpowered, trampled, and asphyxiated by the crush of bodies flowing through a bottleneck at the door. He was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m. at nearby Franklyn Hospital after failed attempts to revive him with CPR. The store closed for two hours later that morning in memoriam.

Damour’s death notwithstanding, the scene outside the Green Acres Wal-Mart was typical across the nation that November day in observance of an annual ritual popularly known as “Black Friday.” The rite is now all too familiar. Each Friday following Thanksgiving, millions of consumers assemble outside retail outlets, malls, and box stores, often camping out all night with friends and family and enduring inclement weather until national chains fling their doors open at daybreak to begin the highest-volume shopping day of the year. The sale day that informally marks the commencement of the holiday shopping season has become a sensational media event. Obligatory human interest stories feature images of impetuous shoppers dashing frantically into aisles stacked impossibly high with discounted retail goods and feverishly foraging through stuffed racks and bargain bins, while the more staid coverage by the financial press tracks sales numbers minute by minute as a weathervane of consumer confidence. Yet both the popular and journalistic conversations about Black Friday rarely deviate from a spendthrift battle cry or scratch beneath the superficial caricature of consumer bliss to question directly the systemic linkages between social, cultural, and economic factors that make the phenomenon of Black Friday possible, factors that, if followed, run deep into the fissures, contradictions, and dangers inherent in a global postindustrial capitalism increasingly dependent on and threatened by deepening systemic risk. The name “Black Friday” may be vaingloriously derived from the color of ink left in corporate ledger books at the day’s profit-taking close, yet if one shifts from the sanguine perspective of those on high to that of others witnessing events from within the panicked crowd, “Black Friday” connotes an ominous pall and refers to a very different kind of bottom line: a bottom hit by those who are left behind to pay the price for windfalls gained and gamed by a system of speculative finance, unsustainable consumer debt, declining wages, and precarious labor.

The shoppers and employees who frequent the Green Acres Wal-Mart are representative of communities feeling the less auspicious effects of the sacrosanct shopping day. The vast majority are black, most commuting to just outside New York City limits to the predominantly white, middle-and upper-middle-class suburban community of Valley Stream, the westernmost suburb of Long Island, bordering Queens, from comparatively lower-income, predominantly African American urban neighborhoods like Rosedale, Brookville, and Laurelton because of easy mass transit access, cheaper prices, and a lack of investment by national retail chains in their own Queens neighborhoods. As for the majority-black employees at the Wal-Mart, many are earning wages regarded as at or below subsistence level, near the minimum in the growing sector of low-paying service sector jobs outsourced to third-party temporary agencies. Damour, a Haitian immigrant, didn’t technically work for Wal-Mart; rather he was an employee of the temp agency Labor Now, one of many firms, such as Staff-mark and SelectRemedy, that crowdsource an exploitable, often immigrant workforce and feeds Wal-Mart cheap, flexible, minimally trained, minimum-wage laborers, making the firm’s employment completely scalable to the contingencies and uncertainties of consumer demand and freeing the retail giant from responsibility for benefits, health care, and workers’ compensation (Bonachich and Wilson 2008; Laird 2009).

There had never been a more opportune moment to read Black Friday as symptomatic of these systemic problems than late November 2008. [End Page...